This is a really old video, and I’m sure all of you would have seen it at some point. I thought it’ll be an interesting thing to re-look, and see just how right – and wrong – Robin Sloan & Matt Thompson were.I suggest watching the video, if you haven’t seen it yet, before reading the rest. It’ll make more sense.

2004Amazon.com – a store that can make suggestionsTrue. Most online retailers have some kind of a rating system, consumer-based. eBay and Amazon being the best examples.Reason magazine sends subscribers a issue of mag with their house on the cover.Sure. Absolutely possible, and if Google decides to do this, they can put a lot more than just where you live… But it’ll scare the pants off people. Maybe Time’s declaring You the Person of the Year in 2006 was premature, for their hard copy version; if you’re a digital subscriber, it could actually have beenyou. With your ugly mug on the cover.

2007Newsbotster sorts news according to what each user’s friends and colleagues are reading.Sounds familiar, all right… How much of your daily media is consumed via facebook recommends, posted links, items liked, forwards, videos posted, images tagged..?

2010Googlezon’s bots pick up contextual cues… and serve up related content.Adwords. Maybe not all content – yet – but advertising content is definitely contextual.Fact-stripping robots are a violation of copyright law –
Yes. This debate also happened with the Gutenberg Project(even though most of Gutenberg’s texts were not subject to copyright law), and Google Books (over a million scanned so far)

2014Epic –
Is anyone else seeing the similarity to Google Wave?Everyone gets paid a tiny cut of Googlezon’s ad revenue –
Adsense again. The entireSEM industry is based on this. The Long Tail has become a part of mainstream business lexicon.Epic – at it’s worst, and for too many, Epic is a collection of trivia, much of it untrue, all of it narrow, shallow, and sensational.
Think status messages, link shares, forwards, spam, comments and tweets? Don’t you curse the people who flood you with this useless flood of non-information, at least once a day?

There was an updated version called 2015, but it didn’t have the… purity of 2014. Apple, Picasa and podcasting were just bunged in as a perfunctionary mention. I’ll stick with the original.

In the end, it always comes back to organizing the information coming in, choosing who generates it. The same rating system that lets you pick a good seller or a good product, is equally extendable to choosing your media inputs. There are specialist websites, content creators, which are rated more highly than others; Often niche and superspecialized, but organizing those niches is going to be a basic survival trait of the human mind.
The ability to ‘Prioritize’ is already a survival and success trait; those of us who know what we’re looking for, have happier lives. The rest… lost in a swirling maelstorm of fluid, shifting information, prey to anomie and living in terror of change, finding solace in simplifiers – drugs, drink, repetitive rigid behavior… can you see it?
Good content gets the rating it deserves from people who recognize it. These people spread the word. Others who recognize that value consume the info as well. And that is social media at it’s best. Getting good info, on the subjects you want, from known, credited sources.

The darker side of the story –
Some organizations know more and more about us. Virtually everything there is to know about us. The amount of personal, private information we willingly entrust to strangers, is staggering. Our email exchanges, documents, what we look like, preferences, realtime locations, even psychological test results… If someone wanted to, could they misuse this data?
Theoretically, yes. Practically…In 1999, the total sum of all human-created data from all history was about 12 exabytes.
On the 15th of June, 2009, 494 exabytes of data were being transmitted across the globe.
(1 exabyte = approximately 50,000 years of DVD-quality video.)

A human cannot keep up with this. A machine – not now. But Moore’s Law is likely to hold good for another 600 years; and while Skynet might happen before that, it’s going to have it’s hands more than full just trying to keep afloat on the exaflood.